Web servers generally maintain a variety of web pages or documents and make the web pages available to client devices upon receiving web page requests from the client devices. Companies, governments, and other entities often rely on the availability of web servers for a variety of purposes, such as servicing clients and connecting employees. As such, it is desirable to monitor web servers for capacity planning and problem-identifying purposes and to maximize web server performance.
In some cases, web traffic simulators have been used to analyze the performance of web servers. These web traffic simulators provide synthetic user transactions in an attempt to simulate what users would do when they visit a web site. However, web traffic simulators present a number of drawbacks. For instance, web traffic simulators fail to provide real-world data including information such as the volume of actual transactions. Additionally, web traffic simulators are limited in the types of transactions they can perform and may not be able to perform transactions that a real user could perform. Further, the web traffic generated by the web traffic simulators typically is not realistic as it does not truly mimic how a real user would interact with a web site. Accordingly, the usefulness of information provided by such web traffic simulators is limited.